"To be or not to be, that is the question"...oops, wrong question. While we may not be facing the same challenges Hamlet faced, choosing whether to climb the mountain called RAID can still be vexing. Once only a luxury for the server crowd, "Lite" versions of IDE RAID are now available to the masses.

For many years, I used tape drives to backup my PC. However, as time went by, I would have to keep buying larger tape drives to keep up with the sheer volume of data on my hard drive. Eventually, my diligent backing up slacked off as more and more tapes were required to complete a single backup. Occasionally I would make a Ghost image of my drive, but I did it so infrequently, it was hardly a reliable backup (and DVD-RW/ RW is still too expensive). In the end, I gave up data security altogether by having no backups. As I was planning my next upgrade, I read an article in MaximumPC magazine that recommended buying a motherboard with a built-in hardware RAID controller. Their position was that even if you didn't use the RAID capabilities, you could still split your IDE drives on to separate RAID channels. If you had four IDE devices, each would have its own IDE channel, thus minimizing traffic on each channel. So I paid the extra and purchased the Abit KR7A-RAID motherboard.

Overview

In a basic sense, RAID is simply hard drives working together. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or sometimes "Independent") Disks. It is a method of combining several hard drives into one logical unit. The levels of RAID are as follows:

RAID 0

RAID 1

RAID 0 1

RAID 5

RAID 0 5

Description

Data striping(no data protection)

Disk mirroring

RAID 0 and RAID 1 combined

Data striping with distributed parity

RAID 0 and RAID 5 combined

Minimum # of Drives

2

2

4

3

6

Benefit

Highest performance

Data protection through redundancy

Highest performance with data protection

Best balanceof cost/performance/data protection

Provides increased fault tolerance

The lite IDE controllers usually provide RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0 1. Two of the newer onboard hardware Ultra133 IDE RAID solutions are the Promise 20271 and the HPT374 controller. Peripheral cards may also offer Level 5 and 0 5 RAID. Finally, there are also third-party and OS software-based RAID solutions.

Since this article is concerned with inexpensive data protection, it will only examine RAID Level 1. In order to satisfy my data protection needs, I had to decide between a weekly backup to a second drive or configure the two drives for RAID 1. What follows is a discussion of some of the Pros and Cons of implementing RAID Level 1.